The 400 Blows
It is my wish that a movie should portray either the pleasure of filmmaking or its agony. I am not interested in anything that falls between these two extremes.
Among other things, “The 400 Blows” (1959) by Francois Truffaut is a very touching film about an adolescent who has just become one. The author based it on his personal experiences. The boy was able to think of something he could do to get his own money and start earning a living through crime. Others looked at him as though he was a bad influence.
We see some of his private moments, such as when he went into his room where there was a small shrine consisting of Balzac’s photograph with lighted candle beside it. It is this last scene, which ends in the shot of him looking directly into the viewer’s eyes before zooming in for freeze frame. This took place after he had escaped from the reform school and stood at the beach confused like someone who is standing amidst water and sand; neither land nor water yet both together: between past and future: his first sight of sea.
Jean Pierre Leaud plays Antoine Doinel with great detached solemnity; it feels like his heart must have been suffering deep mysterious pain long before we started watching this movie. This marked their first collaboration as actor-director, which continued in short film called Antoine et Colette (1962), and three more feature films: Baisers voles(1968), Domicile conjugal (1970) and L’amour en fuite (1979).
One can’t doubt that latter films have their own charm, while “Stolen Kisses” is among most successful works of Truffaut, however “The 400 Blows” which constitute its simplicity and emotionalism stands apart from everything else created by him. This initial work of Truffaut’s is widely recognized as one of the founding films of the French New Wave. We can feel that it was born out of Truffaut’s mind. It is dedicated to Andre Bazin, an influential French film critic who took young fatherless Truffaut under his wing between filmmaking and trouble.
The film does very little for mere showmanship. All these actions make the movie more meaningful in its final scene. We meet Antoine when he is at age thirteen or so staying with his mother and stepfather in a cramped tenement where they are always jostling each other. The mother (Claire Maurier) is a surfer, and thus has blonde hair and tight sweaters; she also suffers from poverty, a troublesome son, and an affair with one of her colleagues.
Unfortunately the boy’s stepfather (Albert Remy) is of another type; he is easy going but doesn’t love him deeply like that. Neither of them spend long time at home both have other commitments that they cannot abandon, so their son receives attention by means of rumors, and external appearance alone matters to them much more than anything else about him.
The teacher of Antoine at school (Guy Decombie) has a typecast him as a troublemaker. He is unlucky. His is the hand that passes the pinup calendar from one hand to another and in which it is discovered by the teacher who then asks him to go and stand in the corner, while making faces at other classmates or writing a lament on the wall.
The boy is ordered by his teacher to correct this grave misconduct. This interrupts him in doing homework. He takes off instead of going back without it. His reason being he was unwell. When he returns later, he claims that his mother died; but she shows up alive and furious at his school and he is known for being dishonest.
Yet we notice him there, inside an alcove serving as his bedroom, deeply engrossed in Balzac’s work whose chronicles of daily life contributed to France’s self-conception. He loves Balzac so much that when assigned to write about an important moment in his life, he describes “the death of my grandfather” using almost direct paraphrasing from Balzac who has become part of his memory. Rather than be considered homage, this act is regarded as plagiarism; thus more troubles follow making things even worse till everything goes out of control: They steal a typewriter with a friend but when returning it he gets caught and sent off to juvenile detention.
In these most touching scenes we see him abandoned by his parents and handed over to social services for protection. His parents tell authorities sadly about their case such as “if he came home, he would only run away again’’.
So that is how they book him into a police station where they put him into custody before placing him into a prison van alongside prostitutes and thieves whom they drive through Paris’ dark roads while peeping out through narrow bars like small heroes of Dickenian stories. In several other moments during the film shot in black and white Paris in a cold season, Antoine’s face is turned up against the wind, always with the collar of his jacket turned up.
Truffaut’s film is not a funeral procession or even an unadulterated tragedy. There are fun and joyous moments(the title is slang for causing trouble’). One priceless sequence, shot looking down from above the street, shows a school physical fitness instructor leading boys on a jog through Paris; two by two they peel off until there are only two or three boys left following the teacher.
The happiest moment in the movie occurs shortly after one of Antoine’s stupid mistakes. He lights a candle to Balzac and sets fire to that little cardboard shrine. His parents extinguish the flames and this time round they decide to take it lightly; so the whole family goes out to watch movies then laughs as they walk back home.
There is a great deal of cinema in “The 400 Blows,” with Antoine, worn out and sobbing, gazing up at the screen. We find that a young Truffaut had also taken to cinemas whenever he could, and there is one shot here which he quotes again later in his career. The two boys are coming out of a film; as they do so, “Antoine takes one of the pictures from the theater lobby” (Thompson 1994). In Truffaut’s own film “Day for Night” (1973), which stars him being a director, there is a flashback memory to the time when this character was a boy walking down dark street stealing stills from in front of the theatre for example those from Citizen Kane.
Cinema saved Francois Truffaut’s life, he said many times. It stole an unruly student and gave him something to love; with encouragement from Bazin it made him both critic and filmmaker before his twenty-seventh birthday. If new wave marks modernity in cinematography and it definitely does for majority then Truffaut may be known as beloved or most loved directors among contemporary filmmakers who have shown their deepest love for making movies. He liked to resurrect old effects(the iris shots in “The Wild Child,” narration in many of his films)and pay tribute (“The Bride Wore Black” and “Mississippi Mermaid” owe much to his hero Hitchcock).
Truffaut (1932-1984) died too young: 52 brain tumor after creating 21 films(not counting shorts and screenplays). His “Small Change” (1976) returns to the sharply remembered world of the classroom to students younger than Doinel, bringing back nearly unbearable tension as the minute hand moves towards last bell. Even while directing a film every year he managed to find time to write about other films and directors writing classic book-length interview with Hitchcock, film by film.
The 1978 “The Green Room” is among the most haunting of Truffaut’s films and it is based on a story by Henry James titled “The Altar of the Dead” that explores the obsession of a man and a woman regarding remembrance of their dead beloveds. Jonathan Rosenbaum said he finds The Green Room as being his best film and for him it is like a tributes to Auteur theory by the director.
That theory was created by Bazin and his disciples (Truffaut, Godard, Resnais, Chabrol, Rohmer, Malle), arguing that director was in fact the true author of any movie not studio or screenwriter or star or genre. Maybe there is now a shrine in this green room for Truffaut if figures there correspond to great directors from times past. One might imagine Antoine Doinel’s ghost who would light a candle before one such thing.
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